Are E-Cigarettes a Boon or a Menace?
Electronic cigarettes may produce an aerosol vapor instead of smoke, but two new studies raise burning questions about their uses and risks.
E-cigs—as these battery-operated nicotine inhalers are commonly called—are increasingly popular, with a Wells Fargo financial analyst predicting that U.S. sales will double this year, going up to $1.7 billion.
Their visibility is becoming ever greater as well, with television and online marketing campaigns that feature celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and Stephen Dorff touting the pleasures of what they describe as more socially acceptable, "guilt-free" smoking.
The reasoning behind such claims is that e-cigs, which have the look of conventional cigarettes stylishly updated for the techno-age, produce vapor instead of ash or smoke. They also generally deliver lower amounts of nicotine than conventional cigarettes-a feature that may make e-cigarettes useful as an aid to smoking cessation.
Research Urgently Needed
Whether that is so was the focus of a study published in The Lancet, which concluded that e-cigarettes were statistically comparable to nicotine patches in helping smokers quit over a six-month period.
But this was only the first study to compare e-cigarettes to an already established quitting aid. "There is still so much that is unknown about the effectiveness and long-term effects of e-cigarettes" that more research is "urgently needed," cautioned lead researcher Chris Bullen, director of the National Institute for Health Innovation at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
In that vein, Alexander Prokhorov, a smoking cessation expert at Houston's MD Anderson Cancer Center who was not involved in the study, commented, "I'm glad that there is finally some tangible research starting to appear." But several aspects worry him. "Nicotine is not a neutral substance," and in addition to being highly addictive, "it can be a poisonous substance."
Because e-cigs mimic the look and rituals of conventional cigarette smoking, there is a danger that rather than e-cigs helping you quit, "you may just switch to this product and continue using it," Prokhorov said. And since a smoker's dependence on nicotine remains, there is a risk for a relapse to smoking conventional cigarettes.
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